We've spent most of the last 20 years in Europe, the bulk of our time in Stockholm, Sweden. A year in London, England and a year in Paris, France have been ours to enjoy as well. Our US home is in Desert Hot Springs, CA where we have landed for the time being.

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Monday, April 20, 2015

The Traveling Passport

Some of you who have been reading this blog might remember that in the autumn of 2012, my passport went missing. I didn't discover it until late the night before I was to travel to the US and it was quite a traumatic experience then. You can read about it here. I had always assumed that it had been taken out of our home because it never did show up. That or I threw it away in a pile of junk, but since I couldn't stomach that thought, I went with the "someone stole it" line.
A few weeks back I got a note from our good friends and former colleagues who had moved to Tokyo, Japan in the summer of 2014. Hanna had been going through some of Chris's bags and wouldn't you know it, the passport showed up in one of the pockets of Chris's computer bag. The most we can deduce is the following:
At one time, Doug, Chris and I all had the same computer bags. At some point, I took my passport over to the office to photocopy it and forgot to remove it from the computer bag. At some point in time, Chris picked up my computer bag and I picked up his. Shortly thereafter, Chris switched computer bags and didn't ever fully clean out the old one. So the passport sat in that bag in their closet completely unnoticed. Until, they moved it to Tokyo, Japan! And even then, what caused Hanna to completely go through it again, is a mystery. But it was a wild day when I got a message from Hanna that said, "You'll never believe what I just found in Chris's bag!"
I am kind of overjoyed with this development, even though, this passport has been canceled since that fateful day I needed to get a new one so I could get back to the US. But this passport has great sentimental value. It contains my work and resident permits from Sweden. It records many, many of our wonderful trips with country stamps and entrance visas. It's like a little mini-travel directory of the years May 2005-until it went missing in October in 2012. I noted that this one expired in 2015 so it just saved me the hassle of having to renew it now!
Of course, I'm very thankful that no one did actually steal my passport. And I am so happy that I finally know what happened to it and perhaps more importantly, that I did not throw it away. Thank you, Hanna and Chris for preserving this little piece of my history. Now that my passport has been to Japan, I hope to visit there as well one day!